


Echoes

by FinalSolution



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Gen, but then it didn't quite make it there, this was supposed to be magical realism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-31 01:04:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FinalSolution/pseuds/FinalSolution
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John was raised with ghost stories and lived through his own horrific nightmare in Afghanistan.  When the discharge brings him back home, he finds out that the stories may have more truth than he thought, and there is an unexpected and unwelcome guest in the Watson home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something for Halloween. I didn't get the entire thing finished in time, so keep an eye out for part two. (This also serves as an olive branch to anyone still patiently - or not - waiting on an Intricacies update. I promise it's not been abandoned, it's just been really difficult for me to write anything I'm pleased with lately.)

John was eight years old when he first heard the noises in the attic.

There had always been swirling stories about the old Watson home, and Harry wasn't above relaying them to little John. She enjoyed giving him a good fright, even if it resulted in their mother scolding her afterwards, when John would end up in the master suite long after the sun had gone down, because he was afraid of the shadows that snaked along his walls and the thumping of his own heartbeat. 

It took him years before he would sleep with either the bedroom or closet door open, thanks to his sister and her tales of the shadow people that sulked in the darkest corners of the house; of the disembodied screams that could be heard wailing from the basement in the dead of night; of the soft creak of floorboards in the attic when said attic was locked from below and unoccupied by anything except dust, spiders, and forgotten reminders of days long gone.

* * *

When John was twelve, his father scared the fear right out of him.

"You're too old for this nonsense," he had said. "I ought to get on Harriet for filling your head with this ghost crap."

John spent the night in the attic, much too on edge to actually sleep, only managing to fall into a light unconsciousness for several minutes at a time before jolting awake at the muffled noises of life from below him, or from the sighing and settling of the ancient house.

After that, he didn't believe in ghost stories anymore. Or at least that’s what he told his father and himself.

* * *

John was twenty-nine when the war took him. He relished in the adrenaline of life at the hospital, knew he was doing a greater good in being there, pulling soldiers and civilians alike back from the ledge of death with his own capable hands. He was a damn good doctor, and he knew it.

Even good doctors have their bad days.

The first time John lost someone beneath his own hands, plunged intrusively and obscenely in the dying man's stomach, he lost sleep over it. _If I had gotten to him quicker. How, how, how, why?_ It plagued him, a murmuring voice in the back of his head that would not disappear, no matter how he tried to silence it.

When he did sleep - he was grateful for the invention of modern sleeping aids - he saw the dead soldier looming over his bedside, his white shirt splashed with dark red, the gaping fatal wound stitched together crudely and carelessly, his eyes narrow and dark and accusing.

After that, John began to see the dead everywhere he looked, and they were all accusing, cold echoes of souls stolen too early.

* * *

John Watson was thirty-five when he was shattered by the war. The bullet had torn through his left shoulder as clean as you please, leaving a mangled mess of torn flesh and tendons in its wake. He couldn't remember much (a defense mechanism, his therapist later told him). There was screaming that sounded utterly foreign to his ears, the loud bellowing sound of an animal in pain, though Randy had told him time and again that it was his own. He remembered the cold, sterilized steel of the table beneath him, contradicted by the hot trickle of blood that seeped from him, made into more and more of a flowing ravine with each scream and each damning beat in his chest. And then, blissfully, he lost consciousness.

Honorable discharge, they had told him. Funny thing, it didn’t feel honorable to be a cripple. He felt discarded and useless, in the wake of his injury and resulting limp. The rehabilitation was a nightmare that he eventually drowned out and let sink into the deepest depths of his memory.

* * *

When John returned to England, it was to London that he went, initially. He kept holed in a small, drab and thouroughly lifeless flat, whittling away his time with crap telly programmes and routine visits to his therapist. Upon her suggestion, he eventually began to also fill the time by writing, though if he was honest with himself, his blog had to be the poorest excuse for one that he had ever seen. 

His pension was hardly able to allow him to live in luxury – or hardly at all, truth be told – and London was a large, lonely place when one could hardly coax himself out of bed on most given days, or even from the flat, when he did manage the former.

And so John Watson, not for the first time in his life, found himself packing his things and moving on.

He returned to the family home in Sussex.

* * *

It was a bit more run-down that he remembered, but he hadn’t been to visit in quite some time, so he permitted that his memories weren’t all that accurate. The two-story Edwardian home had fallen into disrepair since John’s folks had passed on some years earlier, his father succumbing to a heart attack when John was twenty-seven and his mother following a few years later, a year after John had shipped out to Afghanistan. He hadn’t even made it back into the country for her funeral, which was something that haunted him for eons afterward. Being back at the house only served to dredge that guilt back up, an old piece of driftwood that he thought had been lost and long carried out to sea.

The house was set back into its own nook of land, affording him plenty of quiet, and giving him and his sister a wide bredth of exploration when they were younger. There was a single road wide enough for a single car, curving a winding, singular path from the main road for two miles up to the house’s circular drive. For some reason, the family had never had it properly paved, which left it bumpy and meant the drive up had to be taken deliberately slow. On the bright side – and very well possibly the reason _why_ it hadn’t been paved – John wasn’t likely to be surprised by any estranged visitors, since he would easily hear them approaching the house, even at night; being a veteran meant that he had adapted to waking at the tinest sound, from the faint crunch and pop of gravel to the hollow echo of gunfire in the distance.

Behind the house was a small slopped hill, and beyond that, uninhabited forest that expanded for several acres. Not strictly part of the property, of course, but it wasn’t as though anyone else was around to claim it, and John and Harry had often gotten lost in those woods. She used to tell him that they were haunted, and that it was the ghosts of the wood that had followed them back to the house and taken residence in the attic.

“But you said there had always been ghosts in the attic,” John proclaimed.

“Yes, and you trailed home new ones on top of them, you clot!”

John didn’t like the idea of having spectral stalkers one bit.

Wooden stairs had been built into the hill to allow safe descent, and they merged into a narrow path that led away and into the wood. Staying on the path, which bent and wound serpentine among the trees, led to the small family cemetery that marked the edge of the Watson property. John had only been there once as a child, and it had given him such a sense of dread and gloom that he had never went back, until years later as an adult, when he had attended his father’s burial.

The trees were grand and quite majestic in the high seasons, but during the winter months, naked and bare, they loomed over the path and cemetery, dark and menacing, gnarled and aching to whisper the most deranged secrets to anyone brave enough to listen.

For the first week in his new-old home, John worked on cleaning and maintenance; the grass had grown to ridiculous height, the paint on the doors could definitely use a touch-up, and frankly, John couldn’t stop sneezing from all of the dust that had accumulated in the damn place. Harry being the oldest, the home had been left in her name when both of their parents had passed, yet it was glaringly obvious that she hadn’t bothered to come around often enough to keep it up after moving into Clara’s place. Again, John thought with disdain, he was left cleaning up his sister’s mess. He usually did, in one way or another.

One night, after a little over a week of being in the house, John was in the kitchen, making himself a cuppa, as per his usual nightly routine before going to bed. He put on the kettle, opened the cupboard to fish out a cup – the old cherry red one with the chip in the side, he had laid claim to it years ago as a youngster and still found himself using it habitually – and the hum of indistinguishable chatter from the main sitting room carried to his ears as he closed the door again.

John froze, his hand lingering in the air awkwardly, mid-travel back from the cupboard. He had been reading a book and was positive that the telly had not been turned on, nor had the radio – noise distracted him (his uni roommates had often gotten verbal abuse over it). He marched into the room and, sure enough, found the telly on and loudly blaring Graham Norton at him. John frowned, picked up the remote, and flicked the screen off.

The rest of the evening went by without incident; John finished both his tea and his crime novel, and found himself heading to bed at a respectable hour.

Only once he was tucked under the duvet and giving in to the calming ocean of sleep did he remember one very important thing:

He had never had the cable reconnected to the house yet.

* * *

Two days later John was in the study. He was quickly discovering that much of what had belonged to his parents was still littered about the house. It was one thing for Harry to not manage the upkeep, but it looked as though she hadn’t even bothered to clear out or pack away the personal effects either. John realized glumly that it was very likely his older sibling had spent the night and following day (days?) of their mother’s funeral drunk and gibbering. And now here he was, rummaging through the study with a junk box lying next to his feet, trying to figure out what papers could be burned and which potentially needed safekeeping in the attic.

He had given Harry a ring earlier in the morning, asking her to come down at her earliest convenience (which of course meant “right away or so help me, Harriet, you are not leaving me to deal with all of this, it’s your name on the deed for God’s sake”). It was right at noon now, judging by the way the sunlight was crashing through the window of the room, sunbeams bouncing brightly off of the abundance of mahogany woodwork. If he concentrated hard enough, he was sure he’d be able to count every dust particle floating around the room.

A resigned sigh clawed up and through him as he dropped another heap of papers into the “burn” box; they landed with a resolute _thunk_ on the small pile that had already begun to accumulate there. John plunged his hand back into the drawer he had been working through – so far it only seemed to contain personal notes and memos of his father’s, his mother had left the study as it was after he died – when the door, which he had left standing open, slammed shut with a resounding _bang_ that echoed heavily in his ears. John jumped and jerked his hand back in reflexive recoil as his head snapped in the direction of the offending noise.

It only took a moment for the fear to burn away into annoyance. John stood, strode to the door and flung it open, poking his head into the hallway.

“That wasn’t cute, Harry. Aren’t we a little old for this?” Obviously, it couldn’t have been anyone else; the doors were locked, and he and his sister had the only two existing sets of keys. Even if Harry had somehow misplaced them, who would know to which house they belonged? Hell, he wasn’t even sure Clara knew where this place was hidden among the country. She hadn’t been exactly welcome, when Harriet had come out, and John doubted she had ever seen the home aside from glimpses of it in old, dusty and worn photographs.

“Harry?” John’s voice ricocheted down the empty corridor, no Harry to be found. He clicked his tongue with irritation and paced down the hall, his anger beginning to pool in his belly – honestly, this was so completely _stupid_ and like her –

His feet shuffled to a halt when he was in sight of the front door.

The man perched on his heels, crouched by the door with his head cocked to the side, seemingly inspecting the handle. At this angle, all John could make out was an abundance of black curls and an imposing black, long coat.

“Oi! What the hell are you doing?!”

The man’s head jerked around as his body shot upward, and he brought himself to face John’s direction. Something numbingly cold crawled down John’s spine and settled into his belly, effectively replacing the warm rage that had nestled there moments before, as the man’s eyes, sharp and grey (or were they blue?), caught his own.

“Someone lives here, you know. You’ve no right to be nudging around my property.” John drew himself up as straight as a rod, trying not to allow the man’s stature to intimidate him – he was lanky and quite a bit taller than John, and was looking at John down the bridge of his nose, which was wrinkled as though he had just caught an offensive whiff of sulfur.

The man’s eyes narrowed slightly and his mouth moved, no sound coming out, though it looked like his lips had formed the word “curious.” He took a step toward John, who in turn took two steps back.

“You need to leave.”

Another stride – his long legs closed the gap between them in short time – and the man was almost in his face, his mouth opening again as though to speak.

“Look,” John began, gave a blink – and he was alone upon opening his eyes, greeted only by the daylight filtering through the glass panes of the door and the sound of his heartbeat loudly protesting in his chest.

* * *

Two in the morning brought the sound of creaking floorboards and audible footfalls to his ears, and John thought he would never fall back to sleep.


End file.
